An Obituary For Overwatch
In the absence of playing any actual games in Overwatch 2, I had a decent amount of fun staring at its menus as the search time for a match moved into the double digits. There was a weird smugness to seeing the years of work I put into the first entry immediately reflected in the updated client, which to me looks slicker and better presented than anything that came before it.
Overwatch defined my first steps into adulthood. I was in my first year of university when it came out, and remember watching my flatmates jump into the beta as they hyped it up as the next big thing. I’d never played a Blizzard game before, and at the time it was an untouchable bastion of goodwill defined by countless classics. Not so much these days . This was its first new IP in decades, and it had all the ingredients to be a masterpiece.
For the first couple of years, Overwatch was unstoppable. Each new hero was a major event, hyped up with months of speculation as players tried to guess who was coming our way next by digging into the game’s files or drawing from small clues left behind by Jeff Kaplan and friends. Sombra, Doomfist, Orisa, Ashe, Ana, Moira, and Brigitte were all big deals, igniting imagination across the fandom with how their relationships intertwined with the existing roster and how their position in the narrative would come to play an important role.
It was the biggest shooter in the world for a long time. Blizzard eagerly celebrated new player milestones on social media, while seasonal events became an all-encompassing occasion in the shooter space before the days of battle passes and live service updates. It was both ahead of its time and constrained by the formula it existed within, as additional game modes introduced as part of big updates and quarterly events never lived up to the base experience it was built upon. Junkenstein’s Revenge, Overwatch 2 News Archives, and Winter Wonderland were great fun, but fighting against bullet sponge AI wasn’t what this game was about, and hoping to expand on this universe only served to highlight its shortcomings.
I am not thrilled about the new monetization, and I think at the very least there needs to be more ways to earn Overwatch Coins. That being said, we all know how free-to-play games work. If Blizzard makes a bunch of $20 skins, people will buy them. The hope is that Blizzard will reinvest that revenue back into the game so that we don’t have to replay Lucioball or Mei’s Snowball Offensive for the umpteenth time. We’re going to get five or six heroes a year instead of two or three. We’re going to get new maps, new game modes, and a whole new PvE story experience. Overwatch needs to change and grow all the time to keep people playing. The original wasn’t built to be that game, but hopefully Overwatch 2
Like many of you, I enjoyed Overwatch , a video game that I purchased with human money. In fact, because I thought Overwatch would continue to exist, I bought it on more than one platform. I’m not right in the head sometimes, so I actually believed that by purchasing a video game on a physical disc, I would get to play it for a while. I figured I had years to enjoy being a D-level Mercy failing to heal teammates who lowkey hated me.
Overwatch 2 is a strange game to review. It’s a free-to-play live-service experience that depends on a consistent audience to find games and progress through its battle pass. As you might have already guessed, there were only so many games journalists in the world to populate its servers as we rocketed towards the embargo. Thus I am left in a bit of a pickle.
Overwatch 2 is a very iterative sequel, and thus many of its menus will feel very familiar to those who spent time with its predecessor. Because of this stylistic choice I’m going to work through the highlights and point out all of their biggest draws and flaws before deciding on an overall score for the entire package. Yes, some serious science has gone into this idea.
Overwatch will forever and always be a shooter classic, but my heart sinks when I think about how its once pristine legacy has been dragged through the dirt in service of a future that right now still seems so unclear. I formed so many memories around long nights experimenting with new heroes or diving into seasonal events with life-long friends by my side. Few games have ever managed to ignite that sense of passion within me, and that alone is an achievement worth celebrating. Now, as the servers prepare to switch over for good, I’m left mourning the empty void that once defined an entire part of my life.
It’s the same corporate avarice that led us to Stadia , only Google was far more incompetent with how they sold it. Fortunately, Google has more money than there are gods in the heavens; they can (mostly) pay people back for the company’s mistake . But remember Stadia wasn’t a live game that just didn’t take off. It was an entire platform that didn’t take off. A platform that Google promised would stay online for the foreseeable future. And, like Blizzard, Google could also afford the servers.